Gus Hunt on the importance of Link Analysis

Gus Hunt on the importance of Link Analysis

The StructureData conference sponsored by GigaOm, occurring this week in New York, is an annual nexus for all technologies and big thinking related to big data and analytics. This year, as a clear indicator of the rising influence of the government and intelligence community in big date tech, Gus Hunt, the Chief Technology Officer of the CIA delivered one of the keynotes.

It was a riveting talk that outlined both the extraordinary practices already in use, and also laid out the challenges in terms of sheer scale and velocity, for gaining actionable insight from ever-increasing sources of data.

A key point in his speech refererred to the difficulty of “connecting the dots” as with Underwear Bomber, where simply having the data aggregated is not sufficient. This is where visual pattern-based analysis platforms such as Centrifuge play a critical role.